(2020-10-03, 03:27 AM)Laird Wrote: Yes, that seems possible. Perhaps my question was ill-conceived. Maybe a better way to frame it is this:
That conscious self would have to have a non-physical origin, and since we seem to be presuming a spiritual origin for consciousness on nbtruthman's view, then presumably the spiritual designers of reality chose to deny animals an immortal self, such that when they die, that's it for them. Isn't this widely considered to be one of the drawbacks of physicalism - that biological death is annihilation of the self? (And yes, I know that as you have pointed out there are variants of physicalism where this is not necessarily the case, but generally it is). Why would the designers make that choice?
Perhaps the designers might have chosen the approach of a group soul for most animals, because the physical animal vehicle was too small and simple to manifest complex sentient awareness. I get back to the horrid example of the countless millions of factory-farm raised chickens. Are we supposed to believe that each and every such short-lived little chicken, limited to a tiny space in the factory all its life, is a fully aware spiritual entity? I would rather not believe so. Of course there is the old saying, if wishes were horses beggars would ride. Anyway, with animals there probably must be some ultimately spiritual or immaterial essence, but it seems to me that with many it must be very small and simple relative to that of humans, and manifest in the spiritual realm mostly through its group soul.
Alternatively, since this is a sort of brain-storming session, I don't see why the designers couldn't have made the choice of no afterlife for animals, given their evident indifference to animal (and human) suffering over the long process of periodically or occasionally intervening in evolution on the physical Earth. Human values seem to have been of little concern to these entities. How such a pitiless and amoral higher reality could relate to the realm experienced during so many NDEs is another matter. The DMT world might be closer.
Another factor is that aside from all this, I think that probably most lower animals, since they have no concept of death (being unable to think abstractly), correspondingly probably have no fear of death and therefore don't suffer unnecessarily from the fear of it. I don't know of any research that might have impinged on this.